Cheaper Than Prozac
by extrabitter
Summary: Chase, Cameron and Foreman attempt to solve a problem with the office coffeemaker, but House finally figures it out. Gen, oneshot, very silly.


A/N: Written for Kickstarter Number Two at Housefic Pens on LJ. Consider this Silliness without Plot.

Prompt was. "I'm not cleaning this thing out again. It's somebody else's turn," she said.

&&&

Chase spat a mouthful of brownish liquid back into his mug and dropped it in the sink. "Either of you got any gum? Or a toothbrush?"

"Like I'd lend you my toothbrush," Cameron glanced over her shoulder at Chase then went back to the latest issue of International Immunology.

Foreman concentrated on the Wall Street Journal. "You know the coffee's lousy. Why don't you stop for some decent stuff on the way like I do?" He lifted his white paper cup and took a long drink. "Caramel latte, sweet and delicious."

Chase pulled the basket from its holder and sniffed at the coffee grounds. "It's not the coffee; it's the water. Or the pumping mechanism. It could be bacterial."

"You're doing a differential on lousy coffee?" Cameron moved to join him next to the machine.

"This is beyond lousy, it's a brown-eyed mullet."

Cameron and Foreman turned to Chase with curious eyes. "What? It's a figure of speech."

Foreman shook his head as he joined his colleagues in front of the coffee pot. He stuck his finger in the grounds and sniffed the contents of the pot. "I have no idea what your figure of speech means, but the grounds are cold; that means somebody turned on yesterday's coffee to warm it up instead of making another pot; that's the problem."

"But it doesn't smell like burnt coffee; it smells like… vomit," Cameron said, leaning in to take another whiff.

"Whatever, it needs to be cleaned," Chase insisted. He glanced at Foreman; they both leaned toward Cameron.

"I'm not cleaning this thing out again. It's somebody else's turn," she said. "You always expect me to do the clean-up because I'm a woman."

"No," Foreman said. "We expect you to do the cleaning because you always do it." He would have high-fived Chase, but their pagers sounded and the mystery of the bad coffee was forgotten while they checked their latest patient.

&&&

House arrived to an empty office. He considered walking across the balcony to bug Wilson, but he decided to putter around the office and wait for his fellows. The Mod Squad would turn up soon enough.

"Heath, Linc," House greeted Chase and Foreman. "What's on the burner this morning?"

"Huh? Our patient is vomiting, coffee grounds," Chase stated, eying the steaming mug as House raised it to his lips.

"Ah, here's Julie, one step behind, as usual. What do you know?"

Cameron stepped into the room a few seconds behind her colleagues and made a face at House. "I wouldn't drink that if I were you."

Foreman grumbled. "He probably has a bleeding ulcer, we need to get him into surgery ASAP."

"When did you start pronouncing acronyms as words?"

"What does that have to do with the coffeemaker?" Cameron puzzled.

"You," House addressed her, "are falling down on the job." Cameron blinked several times. "I had to make a fresh pot when I got here."

"Yeah, something's… wrong with it," Chase said. "Cameron was supposed to clean it out."

"Hey!" she said. "We got paged."

"Whatever. Hold on the surgery; order a 24-hour urine test for creatinine clearance, and do a head CT," House ordered.

"On the coffeemaker?" Foreman gaped.

"On the patient."

House wrote a few symptoms on the whiteboard and then lost interest. He wandered the few steps to Wilson's office and poked his head in the open door. "Hey, you hungry?"

"It's 9:30. Didn't you eat breakfast?" Wilson asked, not looking up from his papers.

"What can I say? I miss your pancakes."

"I'm about finished with chart review. Meet you down there in ten minutes?"

House squinted with one eye, then the other, but he made his way to the first floor alone.

&&&

"There's no chance it's renal," Chase said with a satisfied look on his face. "We ran a chem panel and his kidney function looks completely normal. Potassium, calcium and phosphorus in normal ranges." He walked toward the back of the room as House crossed "renal" from the list on the whiteboard.

"CT showed significant bleeding in the sinuses. It's probably polyps, and if one of them ruptured, that could account for the blood in his vomit," Foreman announced.

"Great, so our guy is suffering from the mother of all post-nasal drips," House said. He was about to suggest shuffling their patient to those saps in ENT when Chase spat into the sink again.

"Bloody hell! I told you something was wrong." Cameron and Foreman jumped up and the three of them examined the machine.

"Leave this to a professional." House brushed them away with his cane and sniffed at the contents of the pot, then the reservoir, then the filter. "I smell a rat, or a rat fink."

"Please tell me you didn't drown your pet in there," Cameron winced.

House rolled his eyes. "Didn't any of you take chemistry in junior high? No Child Left Behind..."

"Hey!" Chase said. "I wasn't even educated here."

House narrowed his eyes for a split second, focusing on a quirk, something that didn't fit. "I know somebody who was," House murmured as he glanced down at Chase's cup. He filled it and left the room quickly.

"Eighth grade chemistry lab," House said as he stalked toward Wilson's desk. He waved the cup under his friend's nose. "Brings back memories, doesn't it? One day after school, Dave Bryant and I broke into the lab and swiped a bottle of butyric acid. Foul smelling stuff," he reflected. "The couch in the teacher's lounge didn't smell the same for months. We never got caught."

"House, why are you telling stories about your misspent youth?" Wilson struggled to keep his face calm. He turned his head to keep House from noticing that his dimples were showing.

"Why have you been spiking the coffee in my conference room?"

Wilson looked at House and they stared at each other for a good, long minute before Wilson's resolve failed and he shrugged and sat back, finally letting a grin spread over his face. "How did you know it was me?"

House just smiled and tapped Wilson's shoulder with the head of his cane. "Come on, we can watch Divorce Court. Yesterday, Judge Mablean made a stripper pay alimony to her deadbeat ex-husband."

"Once again, the American dream is crushed under the wheels of jurisprudence," Wilson said as he pushed away from his desk.

"Sucks to be you."

"Every time."

They walked toward the elevator, elbows almost touching, each silently wondering how long House's fellows would take to figure out that there was nothing at all wrong with the coffeemaker that a good scrubbing wouldn't fix.


End file.
